I’m always on here apologizing for not writing more. Today isn’t any different – I’m always wishing that I had the time to devote more time to “How to Blog” (as opposed to being slammed with contract gigs and affiliate marketing work). That said, I have several posts that are currently saved as drafts that will be coming down the pipeline that I’m excited about.

WordPress 4.0 Released with some minor feature enhancements

Usually a .0 release of any software indicates some major changes have gone on under the hood. That’s not really the case with WordPress 4.0. Mostly, users will notice an improved post creation process (especially as embeds (like from youtube, twitter, etc) now appear live instead of requiring you to ‘preview’ or ‘publish’ your post to see them) —

WordPress 4.0 has also made some improvements to the Media Manager, including an infinite visual scroll through all of your items, and it is much easier to edit things like title, alt, caption, description, etc for your images although you still cannot change the filename (which frustrates the heck out of me since the filename still plays an important part in SEO).

Faster page load time helps improve SEO and User Experience

Google long ago made clear that they now take the time your website takes to load into consideration as part of their ranking algorithm. In other words, the faster your site loads, the better your site will rank, thus the more you improve SEO. Users also like fast loading pages – if your site is taking too long to load, you might find a lot of users just hitting the back button and trying a different link. So it’s clear that we want our WordPress sites to be as fast as possible.

JetPack plugin for WordPress Review: THUMBS DOWN as it causes significant site speed performance issues and slows down your site.

I have been meaning to post this for quite some time and apologize for the delay, but I wanted to make sure that none of my readers were using the JetPack plugin for WordPress. I know, I know, I used to use it myself, too. When it first came out it seemed like such a great thing – one tool to rule them all, offering so much functionality in a single plugin – which is great. BUT, what’s not so great is the affect that JetPack has on WordPress site’s performance. And I’m not talking about a tiny performance hit, either.

One of the reasons this is so important is because Site Speed is a major factor in SEO now